“Stop it. You don’t know that I am even the correct bearer of this sword.”
“Oh, but I do. I see it in you.”
“You see now more than I do.”
“I do indeed. I see much more.”
Mori shifted in his seat. “Then what do you see in me, Priest? Some evil to be sucked out, like the evil from your father?”
“You are a normal mix of fears, weaknesses, virtues, and strengths. A little heavy on impatience and pride, but that’s to be expected.”
“You see all that?”
“I wouldn’t need second sight for all that.” Suzuki smiled at Takuda, who pretended to be signaling Koji.
Suzuki said to Mori, “Your anger is understandable. You know the existence of infinite love and infinite mercy, but all you can see around you is an imperfect reflection of those beautiful truths. Now you are engaged in a great struggle on behalf of those truths, and you must act as a votary of the Lotus Sutra, but your vision is clouded by the vagaries of this illusory world. You are a perfect being in an imperfect shell, an angel trapped in a gorilla suit.” Suzuki laughed at his own joke. “If I could show you, just for an instant, the world beyond this illusory realm of death and pain . . .” His bony, blue-veined hand rose as if of its own accord toward Mori’s forehead.
Mori recoiled. “I would rather wait, if you don’t mind. Maybe I’ve already seen as much as I need to see in this life.”
Suzuki’s hand floated to the tabletop. “As you wish,” he said. He grinned, the thin lips peeling back to reveal a mouth full of chisels. Takuda had to look away.
“You will see worlds beyond imagining to you now,” Suzuki said to Mori, before turning his attention to Takuda. “And so will you. All will be revealed.” His teeth gleamed. “And then you and I will have a long-overdue reckoning.”
Takuda wasn’t sure what Suzuki meant, but the dark presence in his head shoved him aside to use his voice: “I’m looking forward to it, old friend.”
The pain was immense, just as it was every time the presence spoke through him, but Takuda was getting used to it. A man can get used to anything, he thought. He pushed his temples together with his palms to make sure his head didn’t actually split down the center.
While Takuda recovered, a group of surly youths strolled in, bush-league punks reverse-slumming on the nice side of town. They wore their hair slicked back, and they were all dressed in baggy double-breasted suits in improbable colors.
Takuda saw nothing out of the ordinary, but the priest’s eyes glittered. “Sometimes, now, I see things differently. I wonder, when I see someone out of balance, if I couldn’t just . . . tinker a little bit.”
One of the lads bowed to Suzuki. Another, with his back to Takuda, twisted in his seat to look at Suzuki. He had too many nostrils, and cloudy membranes blinked sideways over the slitted pupils of his yellow eyes. A forked tongue slipped out to test the air around Takuda, Mori, and Suzuki.
“That’s more than an issue of balance,” Takuda said.
“Oh, that one? No, he’s none of our business. Probably just passing through this life on his way to one of the frozen hells, I’d say. But the boy across from him, he could be saved.”
“But he’s none of our business either, is he?”
“That’s a good question. Other than seeing to my brothers, what is our duty? And what is that growing out of your face?”
“What do you mean?”
Suzuki picked up a coffee spoon and smacked Takuda in the center of the forehead. Takuda cursed to wild laughter from the table of punks. As Takuda rubbed his forehead, he felt it: the beginning of a thick, horny growth. It was as though the skin had thinned and melded with the bone, thickening to shingles of rough, nail-like substance.
Takuda was growing a third horn, a broad one, right in the middle of his forehead.
“I’m a man, not a devil!”
One of the punks said, “Did you hear that? He said he was a man, not a devil!”
“He’s neither,” said the reptilian creature. He turned his head completely backward to stare at Takuda with his deadly yellow eyes. “He should come to this table if he wants to meet one or the other.”
The table erupted in laughter as an indifferent Koji brought the punks their beer. One of the punks asked if Koji had come to their table to meet a man or a devil. They made kissing noises at him.
Suzuki made an odd whistling noise between his teeth. “I shall now introduce them to the mysterious love of the Lotus Sutra,” he said, rising from the table.
Mori caught him by the sleeve. “Not now. Not here.”
Suzuki stared down at Mori. Takuda saw something new flaring behind Suzuki’s eyes, a deadly mix of anger and hunger. He didn’t know if he could handle the hungry priest in his new state.
“I don’t appreciate the way you speak to me sometimes,” Suzuki said.
Mori lowered his eyes. “I don’t understand any of this, but I think we must be very careful with any . . . new powers we . . . remember.”
Suzuki wavered.
“We don’t know much,” Mori said, “but we know the surge when it comes. This isn’t it.”
Suzuki sat, and Mori released his sleeve. Mori was sweating.
Good, Takuda thought.
Mori stood and bowed formally. “For my rudeness, for my impatience, for my lack of faith, I most humbly apologize. For the way I have spoken to you before our strange little family and before outsiders, there are no words to express my shame. Please forgive me, though I do not deserve your forgiveness.”
“About time, too,” Koji muttered, bringing another round of beverages. “You work him to the bone—look at how thin he is—and you keep him away from me for days and days, and then you bring him back just as I have to endure this ridiculous junior gangster convention. Yes, I am talking about you in your avocado-green suit, and you’ll just accept that if you want clean food.” Koji turned from scolding the hooting punks to lavish his attention on Suzuki. “So you, my priest, you just take his apology as good as gold so we can build up your strength. Then you can tell me again about the sutras and this universe of yours, this place of infinite love and infinite justice and infinite mercy.”
“He’s forgiven, of course.” Suzuki looked at Mori with genuine warmth.
“Well, then,” Koji said, scooting in beside Suzuki. “Let’s talk about appetizers. You first, Reverend Suzuki, as you are looking so thin.”
“Dear Koji,” said Suzuki. He smiled with a mouth full of beveled steel and placed one blue-veined claw over Koji’s pink, pudgy little hand. “Dear, dear Koji. Right now, I couldn’t eat a bite.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Thao Le of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency for her energy and enthusiasm, and thanks to Rebecca Lucash of Harper Voyager for bringing out the best in this story.
Special thanks to the kind and generous people of Fukuoka City for putting up with me for the duration of the 1990s. Thanks also to David Hughes, an unsung beta reader of The Drowning God, and to Honeycomb Jack, the APE Records forum troll who helped fuel my determination to keep writing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES KENDLEY, author of The Drowning God and The Devouring God, has written and edited professionally for more than thirty-five years, first as a newspaper reporter and editor, then as a copy editor and translator in Japan (where he taught for eight years at private colleges and universities), and currently as a content wrangler living in northern Virginia with his lovely wife and two fascinating and wonderful children.
kendley.com
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The Drowning God
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or ar
e used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DEVOURING GOD. Copyright © 2016 by James Kendley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
EPub Edition MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780062360670
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062360687
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